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Culture Dance

Strap yourselves in

ROAD TRIP created and performed by Susie Burpee and Linnea Swan. Presented by Danceworks as part of Harbourfront Centre’s NextSteps at the Enwave (235 Queens Quay West). Opens tonight (Thursday, October 18) and runs to October 20, Thursday-Saturday 8 pm. $19.50-$34. 416-973- 4000, harbourfrontcentre.com. See listing.

Despite the lack of actual cars, you might want to buckle up for Susie Burpee and Linnea Swan’s Road Trip. It could be a wild ride.

“The road trip is an obvious metaphor for our journey together,” says Burpee when I meet her in the studio with Swan, her co-performer/choreographer, her adorable year-old daughter, Alice, and artistic adviser Marie-Josee Chartier.

“We’ve used our relationship as a framework to look at things like competition, complicity, knowingness, intimacy, the dark and the light that is two people.”

Watching the two friends rehearse a scene, I’m reminded of the great girl duets in popular culture. But these two seem more Lucy and Ethel than Thelma and Louise.

They show similar gifts for deadpan comic anarchy, hurling folding chairs around the studio, a whirlwind of crashing noise and flying furniture.

Burpee seems like the thoughtful one, Swan more a loose cannon, but I get the sense that the opposite might also be true. They egg each other on, and both point out that they can “spiral out of control” pretty quickly.

Long-time fellow travellers in the Canadian dance universe, they share, according to Burpee, “an artistic genealogy.”

That history includes training at Winnipeg’s School of Contemporary Dancers (not at the same time), years dancing with the Ruth Cansfield Dance Company (not at the same time) and Dancemakers, and formal studies in bouffon “dark clown” technique. They’ve also worked in theatre: Burpee choreographed Stockholm for Nightwood Theatre earlier this year, while Swan recently toured in Human Cargo Theatre’s Night.

In both disciplines they’ve earned reputations for being fearless and, when it’s called for, very funny.

“Road Trip consists of two stylistically very different sections,” explains Swan, post-rehearsal. Burpee adds, “The first half has a sense of being a fictional narrative in the second half you get much more of Susie and Linnea and the backstory.”

To help build a vocabulary for the show, the pair improvised using events and actions from their shared past as well as gestural and choreographic quotations from Lesandra Dodson and Serge Bennathan, among others.

“That then gave rise to a more abstract narrative,” explains Burpee, “that shows the things that have happened to us in our relationship without resorting to reminiscing.”

The pair also draw on bouffon, which can work to nudge audiences into self-recognition.

“Instead of simply mocking, the bouffon clown makes the audience feel comfortable with humour,” says Swan. “Then she exposes the ills of the world and their possible part in that.”

Swan says classical bouffon training is also famously brutal in its efforts to destroy performance inhibitions. So dance fans drawn to the show for Swan and Burpee’s expert physicality can expect a pedal-to-the-metal approach to this exploration of friendly female rivalry.

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